Traditional Taro Soup Cooked in 6.5-Meter Stewpot Fills 30,000 Hungry Stomachs in Yamagata

The Yomiuri Shimbun

14:42 JST, September 15, 2025

YAMAGATA — Locals and tourists enjoyed a signature local dish cooked in a giant stewpot big enough to serve 30,000 people at a festival held on a riverbank in Yamagata on Sunday.

The dish, called “imoni,” is a kind of soup typically made with taro, meat such as beef, green onions and konjac. It is a seasonal dish served in the city during autumn.

At the festival, 3.2 tons of taro, 1.2 tons of beef and 3,500 green onions were added to the giant stewpot, which had a diameter of 6.5 meters. Two crawler excavators were used to stir the soup.

This year, there was a poor harvest of taro, the main ingredient, due to extreme heat during the summer, and not enough of the crop was produced on a farm specially cultivated for the event. Organizers, therefore, had to scramble to collect taro from various places in the prefecture.

“The taro was stewed very well and had absorbed all the good flavors from the broth,” said a woman visiting from Sendai. “It was very delicious.”